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This show starts off with the song ”It’s a departure” by The Long Winters every week and many of their listeners have gotten into that band thanks to them. This week, they have a celebrity question of Mr. John Roderick of The Long Winters himself:

Hello, My Brother My Brother and me brothers, this is John Roderick calling and my question for you is: I want to be an eBay retailer. I have a lot of junk that I have collected because I am a collector and now I’m looking around my house and I’m realizing that I’ve crossed the line from being a collector to being a crazy person in a house full of crap and so what better way to unload the crap than to go on eBay, but I can’t stand being on eBay. Whenever I’m there it just confuses me and it doesn’t fill me with delight like being in a room full of crap does, so what I’m trying to do is transition from being a crazy person in a room full of crap to a wealthy person in an empty room and I think eBay might be the way, but I don’t have the first idea how to begin, so any suggestion or advise for me? Thanks so much, homies!

John has gotten to them just in time because he was about to make a terrible mistake. No-one puts you on TV for reasonably getting rid of your stuff. Instead, you got to lean into it! That digital ink, that TV ink of getting on the hit-show Hoarders is going to be great for your band and great for your image! People have talked about that fucker from The Libertines for 2 years, just because he had such a terrible drug addiction. People are going to chat up the lead singer of a lead Indie Rock band who is also a hoarder! People will get up to him on the street saying ”Hey, I saw you on Hoarders and your house looks like Scrooge McDuck’s vault if he were a homeless person, but your albums are great!” You will never see a headline saying ”Hit Indie Rocker killed by a mountain of air”, but it has got to be old newspapers, shoe boxes filled with toe nail clippings or piles of 45 gramophones. So many hoarders make the number one mistake: You can’t go organic! You gotta keep the organics out of it because then you are dirty, it is dark, and it is shameful because you have a compost home and nobody wants that!

There are styles of hoarding that would actually be awesome, like hoarding old Nintendo Power Magazines. That makes you a collector, but what John was saying is that if you collect enough things, then you become a hoarder. Maybe he just has to move to a bigger house? If you have 20.000 sqft and you fill it with 1000 sqft of old newspaper clippings and coupons from the 1970s, you are no longer a hoarder, but an eccentric person with a large house. If you have a room for Perfect Strangers memorabilia, then you are not a weirdo, but if your house is covered floor to ceiling with it, you have a problem. That is actually a hit new idea called a museum, but you would be creating more problems, like overhead and this special tax classification.

Maybe they are a little myopic by just focusing on Hoarders. There are a lot of other reality TV shows to help John get rid of his stuff and make some money off it. You got Pawn Stars, they will give you Matt Scrilla, and you got American Pickers, they will just swoop in and give you fair trade for your stuff. There is Storage Wars where you just have to put all your stuff into a storage unit, get delinquent on the payments and it will be gone! You don’t get any money for it, but your stuff gets on TV and you get to watch your memories picked over by heartless men. You can get on LA Ink and get tattoos of the the stuff you have. You can go on Real Housewives and marry a sweet beautiful woman! You can be the one guy with the beard who is a hoarder and married the one from Sweet Housewives of Atlanta.

If you have to use eBay, the trick is that you got to make it seem like your sales space won’t fuck the user right through their pants. You have to make it seem like a safe space for them, like you are actually going to give them the things that they want. Why not use your name on there? You are not selling old newspaper clippings, but you are selling Rock memorabilia. Everything you own is Rock memorabilia. Be careful that if you take a picture of something that is shiny and reflective that you are dressed in that reflection - or not!